Istanbul: Javier Villa qualifying report

The good lap times set by Javier Villa during today's practice and
qualifying sessions won't mean a good starting position for the young
Spanish driver in tomorrow's GP2 feature race.
A ten position penalty, handed to Villa after his clash with...

The good lap times set by Javier Villa during today's practice and
qualifying sessions won't mean a good starting position for the young
Spanish driver in tomorrow's GP2 feature race.

A ten position penalty, handed to Villa after his clash with Porteiro at
the Hungaroring, mean that Javier is condemned to start from the rear of
the grid.

Despite this Villa didn't give up and did a good job during the free
practice, finishing amongst the top ten for the first time after setting
the 9th fastest time in the morning session whilst having his first
experience of the complicated Istanbul Park circuit.

In qualifying however, bearing in mind the penalty he has to face, Villa
and his engineers agreed not to go for a quick time and, instead, focus
on the race setup. Nevertheless despite not pushing as hard as possible
to save his tyres for the race, Javi took the 19th quickest time while
doing some long runs looking for a consistent and balanced behavior for
his car.

Once the penalty is applied, Villa will start from the last position on
the grid so his target will be to run faultlessly and finish as high a
possible in order to improve his chances for Sunday's race whose starting
grid is determined by the Saturday race results.

Javier Villa's own words:
"The qualifying session was good; nineteenth, but I wasn't really
pushing the tyres because we want to keep some new ones for the race. The
car is a little better here, and in free practice we could go really
fast, and now in qualifying we had a car that was set up more for the
race. But I'm quite happy because tomorrow we can do twenty laps, really
consistent, no problem."